The Mapleton plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mapleton’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Guthrie Mountain, about 1,040 ft, 2 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marmaton Group (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Mapleton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Osage, the Osage, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,630 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mapleton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.